Thursday, October 29, 2009

Keeping it in the bedroom.

I had a Very Bad, No Good, Horrible Terrible day at work today. I don't mean "late on TPS reports" bad, I mean that I was spat on and slapped and punched multiple times. And contrary to unnervingly popular opinion, liking that sort of thing in bed has fucking nothing to do with how I feel about it in the real world. (I feel somewhat negatively about it. Thanks for asking.)

It really bothers me when people draw this kind of connection between the real world and the sex world. I was almost as weirded out when a person at a kink meetup talked about her daughter chasing around and hitting the boys at her daycare, and remarked "she's turning into a little domme!" I know it's a joke, but ew. Ew, and also wrong because that's not what dommes do. Unless they're psychopaths, dommes don't run around hitting boys; they run around asking boys "can I hit you?" Kind of an important distinction.

Even when it's not violent, people saying things like "ooh, you work at a shoe store, you must have a foot fetish" and "ooh, you have a foot fetish, do you work at a shoe store?" ook me out equally. Again, I know, joke, but it's a much creepier joke than intended. Somewhere up there with "oh, you work at a morgue, are you a necrophiliac?"

Of course it's not really sex that draws the hard line between "ha ha, hitting" and "OH FUCK, hitting"; it's consent. If a foot fetishist indulges their fetish at work, it's not cute, because the customer didn't consent to foot-molestation. Seeing sex where there's no sex is déclassé; seeing sex where there's no consent is mega creepy.

9 comments:

THANK YOU. Reading this post, I'm reminded of a hypersexual ex-girlfriend (not the fun kind) who simply did not understand that, although you can put almost anything in a sexual context, not everything is sexual to start with. In her opinion, if you worked at a shoe store, you were a foot fetishist – which meant that she was free to rub her feet against some unsuspecting salesman's cock while he fitted her. Mention that this was inappropriate and you'd be shouted down for being "sex-negative or prudish". As hard as we tried, my friends and I never ended up being able to explain to her that this was very, very creepy. If I was still in contact with her, I'd point her to this post – once again, you sum it up way, way better than I ever could. Well said, Holly! Keep it coming.

Wow, I know you want to keep stuff like this private for obvious reasons, but what kind of job do you have that a situation like that is even anywhere near remotely ok or tolerated? I can't even imagine the crapstorm my local work compo would throw up!

Dan - It wasn't coworkers or even the general public, it was a known crazy person, and I can't ask not to work with crazy people.

Hershele - If I were a foot fetishist, I would worry that all the unattractive stinky feet I saw all day at work would burn me out to the point where I couldn't enjoy some nice pretty feet when I got home.

It seems to me that people who are sex-obsessed generally refuse to admit it and project it on to everyone around them... so that they're paragons of virtue and nearly everyone else is on the verge of being a sex-crazed maniac. I've seen people like that who aren't even joking - they wonder if, or even outright assume that, major elements of other people's lives are somehow related to their sexual fetishes.